Dying and the Virtues by Matthew Levering (review)

In Dying and the Virtues, Matthew Levering affirms that dying leaves indifferent neither nihilists, who see death as a disaster, nor optimists, who expect the afterlife to be familiar. Levering's approach is a thoroughly Christian response to the tragedy of death and its meaning. He draws from Hans Urs von Balthasar (2-4), who offers three essential ways to find sense in dying. First, there is the incomprehensibility and absurdity of death. It insults meaning, undermines the whole of life, and unsettles the very permanence of love. Second, there is the New Testament affirmation that believers need not worry about death. They have already died with Christ in baptism and will also be resurrected and live forever with Christ (John 6:58). Third, union with Christ and his redemptive suffering is the source of new life. For Levering, these three angles—death as absurd, death as conquered, and union with Christ's death as the source of becoming a new creation—combine to illuminate the Christian call to a virtue-informed preparation for dying.

Levering provides a compelling approach that pairs the virtues with themes and exemplars: (1) love and Job's challenge to God, (2) hope and meditation on the nature of dying, (3) faith in Jesus and the fulfillment of desire, (4) penitence and the witness of the protomartyr St. Stephen, (5) gratitude and St. Macrina, (6) solidarity through divine mercy and redemptive suffering, (7) humility as evidenced in Jesus' dying and in our own, (8) surrender and the sacrament of the sick, and (9) courage to say goodbye to the world as we know it. His matching of the virtues with such themes and models, practices and goals becomes enriched as throughout the book he draws out insights through careful study of its sources.

In the first five chapters, Levering addresses the three theological virtues and their effects in a unique way. Chapter 1 employs the Book of Job to reveal the urgency of the question about whether God loves Job, which is especially pertinent in the face of Job's loss of family and his anguish about the annihilation of his personal existence. Levering's interpretation of the narrative of Job identifies the pattern of the encounter between God and Job: God's definitive response to the painful course of events opens up a silence through which God responds with divine love to queries about life after death (27).

Chapter 2 offers narratives that demonstrate how to bolster hope by meditating on dying (meditatio mortis) as a preparation for death. Christian examples include Josef Pieper, Robert Bellarmine, Francis de Sales, and Jean-Pierre de Caussade, who contribute to a philosophy and theology of death, the spiritual soul, and the existence of God. There is a vivid contrast to the Christian approach in the way philosophical materialists, such as Susan Sonntag and Oliver Sacks, suffer despair due to their denial of meaning in life and in death (31). They suffer from an expectation that their desire for eternal interpersonal communion will be met with everlasting nothingness. However, the believer's imagination is marked by the ultimate end of life (37). Christ offers a way to die well, to be patient in suffering (Rom 12:12), and to hope on one's deathbed.

Chapter 3 addresses the questions of what the greatest and most persistent desire of people is when they are dying, and whether Jesus responds to this desire. Levering compares a Christian perspective with interreligious and New-Age perspectives on the experience of dying. In particular, Kathleen Dowling Singh (The Grace in Dying) and David Kuhl (What Dying Persons Want) identify the main human desires in the face of death: eternal "existence, communion, and unity" (59). Beyond these three desires, however, Levering rightly recognizes the need for reconciliation with God. Although expressed through self-giving love, reconciliation is not usually included in such non-Christian approaches. Nonetheless in basic human experience, we do find that...